


James Barnes' Body

by whereismygarden



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Identity Issues, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-06-10 03:47:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6938431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier and Bucky coalesce into one, painfully. </p>
<p>Powerade, solitary road-tripping, unreasonable amounts of theft, journaling, modern technology, container ships, and lots of walking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Till Human Voices Wake Us

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to go through the transition from the barely-lucid Winter Soldier to the quiet Bucky we see in Civil War. 
> 
> I also have been reading lots of early 20th century poetry. So this is called "James Barnes' Body" because I'm trying to read John Brown's Body (it's very long) and there are some vague relations between the topic of the poem and the movies. I'm very pretentious, and probably won't update on a schedule.

                The Soldier walks south. It does not go to its rendezvous point. The compulsion to go to the rendezvous point is dim and subdued, overpowered by the clamor of fear in its head. Fear is not permitted. Fear is restricted to the chair. The Soldier was afraid when it was pinned down in the wreckage: afraid of its target. The target incited something that fizzled and flared in the Soldier’s mind, and the Soldier cannot remember it at the moment. Remembering is restricted. Mission report.

                The Soldier fixes its dislocated shoulder. It can drive almost any vehicle: it steals a fast car. Not too flashy, but fast. The gas tank is nearly full. There is no food and water in the car, but there is a sweatshirt and a pile of papers. The sweatshirt is too small, but the Soldier puts it on anyway. The metal arm is eye catching, which is not ideal for going into hiding. It is going into hiding. The papers are difficult to read: English, a plain typeface, a mixture of lists and figures and text. The Soldier figures out that they are something to do with real estate, and disregards them. It is hard to read things that are not formatted like the files it is accustomed to, or a street sign.

                It drives south on I-95 and exits the interstate close to a city that has been on the signs for about 50 miles (80 kilometers), signifying it is not too big. It parks the car at a truck stop and watches. The truck stop is full of solitary men, a large percentage of whom do not speak to each other. Most of them drive large trucks but there are also cars, like the Soldier’s. The Soldier folds its metal arm under the other and goes inside.

                It is bright inside. It smells like grease. There are crowded shelves and racks. The Soldier moves away from the counter, but not too close to the windows. It heads to the racks with clothes, pulling on a sweatshirt that fits. Then a hat with a brim that can be pulled low, and black gloves. The gloves are designed for warmth, but they cover the hand. The Soldier bites through the plastic ties that hold on price tags and kicks the trash under the racks.

                The Soldier is hungry. The smell of meat and bread fills the whole building. It cannot go up to the counter to order food. It has no local currency. It takes a bottle of water from the cold cases at the back wall and drinks the whole thing, then another. Some of the bottles are colored. The Soldier picks one up. The label says

                POWERADE. ADVANCED ELECTROLYTE SYSTEM. SPORTS DRINK AND VITAMINS B3, B6, and B12.

The drink is bright blue. The label says there are 80 Calories (kilocalories) in the bottle. The word “electrolyte,” once the Soldier sounds it out, carefully, quietly, in English, feels familiar. It takes 10 bottles, for a total of 800 kilocalories.  It also takes a bag labeled Milky Way, because that feels familiar, in the part of the Soldier’s mind that flickers in and out. The Soldier is good at not being noticed; the theft is easy. It is also easy to steal a different car. The gas tank in the other is nearly empty now, and it has no local currency to buy petrol (gasoline).

                This car has speakers, which play something as soon as the car starts.

                _You are one of God’s mistakes, you crying tragic waste of skin, I’m well aware of how it aches, and you still won’t let me in_

The Soldier eats several of the Milky War bars and drinks two bottles of Powerade. It feels highly distressed. It feels—it feels very upset. Its heart is beating as though during combat, though driving the car is simple. Its guts move unpleasantly. The Soldier pulls to the side of the interstate, opens the door, and leans out to vomit onto the shoulder. Its guts do not feel much better. The sound from the speakers is frenetic. Maybe if—maybe if the _damn music would stop, what the fuck is this garbage, it’s goddamn disturbing, it’s as—_ something in the Soldier’s brain skitters and runs into a wall.

                _I’d break the back of love for you I’d break the back of love for you I’d break the back of love for_

The Soldier hits the buttons with its right hand, trying to stop the music. It pulls back onto the interstate. The radio is easy to figure out now that it’s attempted to do so. Tuning the radio rather than having whatever was already playing is more acceptable. It can also turn the speakers off, but the radio is good. It has missed—missed?—the radio.

                The Soldier drives until it reaches a place called Ocean Isle Beach. It steals supplies from stores, and a rowboat. There is something called the Intercoastal Waterway here. It locks the rowboat in a place where the Waterway meets the ocean, and washes in the Atlantic, after the sun is down. The cool water and handfuls of sand scour off dirt and grease and blood. He washes his clothes. He needs to learn about where he is.

                Now the Soldier is slightly more comfortable calling himself “he.” A large part of it does not want to regard itself as a person, the way that those who are not it but are the same species, are persons. It has been set apart, set aside, _cut apart, sliced away—_ the Soldier does not want to think about it. The flickering thing that thinks of itself as “he” and the things that the Soldier is and has experienced repel each other. The flickering thing can grow if the Soldier controls its thoughts.

                One thing the flicker and the Soldier have in common is a familiarity with weapons. The Soldier finds a place out of the sand-blowing wind and cleans his guns. A full moon rises over the dark water: something about this is soothing. The smell of briny water, a slight breeze, his feet in the Atlantic and the white moon overhead: this feels close to home. He doesn’t know what that means yet.


	2. Inch My Way Down the Eastern Seaboard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for: mention of sexual assault (German), vague reference to archaic medical procedures (English). Really bad German, also.

                The Soldier wakes up, startled. He is cool, but not cold. The world is rocking slightly. He is in a small wooden boat. The sky is turning very pale blue. The Soldier develops a headache that bites into his left temple like a spike. _And I would know_.

                The pointed agony of spikes and hooks, the narrowed, ecstatic, never transcendent pain of scalpels, the diffuse, contracting, blinding white of electricity. The heavy, reinforced leather and iron of the chair, the chair, he never forgets the chair, once they have the bit in his mouth he remembers. Something going up his nose, something going down his throat. The guards sneering and watchful, _dieses Tier, wie ein wilder Hund verstummelt, kann wir fausten die Faust von HYDRA? Or haben sie kastrieren es?_ _Eh, es spielt keine Rolle._ Fear is not permitted, except in the chair. He is in the chair. He is waiting for orders so he can get out of the chair.

                The taste of dirty, brackish water cuts through its memories. It is in a moored rowboat in one of many small hidden inlets off the Intracoastal Waterway. It drove here from Washington, D.C. after a failed mission. The thought of the failed mission makes the Soldier feel sick, incredibly sick, and the details of the mission stir rudely through the other presence, like a stick in a small pool. He sits up and tries to vomit into the water, but nothing comes up. He has four bottles of the blue drink remaining. He sips on one, something whispering faintly, _if you drink it all at once you’re gonna get sick._

He sits in the shade of the cattails and struggling trees, trying to think, wiping dried salt from his face. He can’t remember why exactly he came here. There is a lot he can’t remember, if he thinks about it. The chair stands out clear, men in white and black moving around it, like comets around the sun, if the sun was _a sucking empty hole of nothing, iron thing with a bullet for a heart, red star or not_. The chair and all things associated with it frighten the Soldier, but don’t disturb it. The disturbed thoughts seethe up from nowhere, from the still pool with the flicker.

                He stares at his bottles of blue drink. The Soldier understands that the other thing will grow: it’s not afraid of that. The Soldier is a weapon, with nothing to aim it. This other thing will do that.

                That had caused the mission to fail. The target.

                The man on the bridge.

                It grabs its face with the left arm. The metal is cool. The Soldier does not have memories. The Soldier has skills. It has capacity. It has intelligence. It has adaptability. It has orders.

                Currently, he has no orders. Not even the orders to go to the rendezvous matter, and while that’s where the Soldier should go, the other thing, the flicker, wants something else.

                “Ready to comply,” the Soldier tells the flicker, startling a bird out of a nearby tree.

                He needs information. The information that is missing: name? The Soldier does not have a name, but the uneasiness that sits inside his stomach tells him maybe that’s not completely right. His location is, according to the signs, Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina. In the United States.

                He leaves the rowboat hidden and goes to see the town. It immediately becomes obvious that the town is very small and not a good place to remain. It is, so far as he can tell, disproportionately full of small children, and likewise not very full of single men in badly disguised combat gear. The Soldier steals a box of saltine crackers and a map from the gas station and leaves before children more obviously run from him.

                _People visiting the shore,_ he notes.

                He should have gotten more blue drinks and water: the saltines make his mouth dry. He looks at the map. There is a much larger town close, to the south: he can go along the waterway the entire way. If it becomes too exposed, he can leave the rowboat and continue on foot. A motorized boat would be better, faster, and there are plenty here, up among the houses, to choose from. But a motorized boat would be easy to spot and chase. Slow and silent and inconspicuous. He goes about a mile down the waterway, a fake fishing line on the bow of the boat. Then he gets out and steals more food from a different store.

                The Soldier wishes he had local currency, though he is better than anyone in the world at going places unnoticed, including convenience stores.

                The Soldier was not trained in stealing small things from shelves, but he is remarkably good at it. There’s a muscle memory, very faint and old. This time, the other thing sparks up and then hits some sort of wall.

                He throws up into the waterway again: one of the foods was not good. The sun rises up hot and hazy against a white sky; the water glitters. The Soldier shudders against the lack of cover, the poor visibility. The other thing finds the sun on the water beautiful. The rowing is annoying, because the left shoulder can pull so much harder than the right.

                He tries to think about names. _Soldat._ The Winter Soldier. _That thing, unvullstandig Hund, Tier, the new fist of Hydra._

                The man on the bridge. His thoughts return to him again. The water of the Potomac shining up light below them as they battled on the floating structure.

                _Your name is—_

The Soldier hears a roaring white noise, and jerks reflexively in the boat. No no no no no no no no no. There is something in the way. Something screaming with the voice of electric buzz, something as unstoppable as the thin sharp flexible pieces of metal that go up his nose. All of his muscles are tensed, and the grooved handle of his left oar is splintered. He adjusts his grip, adjusts the way he pulls, and points the boat southward.

                He will think of other things. The name can come later. He can remember other things. Then the name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line about being an iron thing with a bullet for a heart is adapted from "John Brown's Body." Chapter title uncreatively lifted from "Jaipur" by the Mountain Goats.
> 
> I read in some fic, I can't remember what, that it wouldn't be unlikely that the first brain-scramblings were done with a good ol' lobotomy, which were super popular in the 1950s and were done by sticking a cannula up the patient's nose and putting hella lesions in the frontal lobe. Fun stuff! 
> 
> I am actually pretty familiar with the region of the US the Winter Soldier is currently camped out in, but let me know if there are mistakes. I already misspelled the Intracoastal last chapter.
> 
> Also, the only thing that brings me brief joy between trying to hammer introductory biology into the heads of students and passing out grading their papers is the rush of AO3 comments. Please sustain my life-force.


	3. Ghost on the Grand Strand

                North Myrtle Beach, as a place to hide in, is far superior to Ocean Isle Beach. The Soldier hauls the rowboat out of the waterway and hides it a little, but he is not too worried about it. He rinses all traces of himself out of the empty bottles by dunking them in the waterway, and leaves them in the bottom of the rowboat. He has a small package of dried apricots (product of Turkey) in his sweatshirt pocket and the last bottle of blue drink in his hand. All of his guns are hidden from view.

                There is one main road close to the waterway, called 17. It is lined with shops and restaurants, most of which seem to be open. The road is choked with traffic: the orange sunset behind him reflects off glittering paint and windows and mirrors. The Soldier notices many people on motorcycles. The clamor of crowds and the smell of cooking fish and engine oil are pleasant.

                From one shop selling clothes for the ocean, he steals a long-sleeved shirt and a different pair of gloves. They are partially open on the back, but with a piece of cloth tied around his hand, the metal won’t show. These are better for using his hand. And even though he’s washed, the leather of his jacket is sticking hot to his skin.

                He wants to get rid of the jacket, badly. But—the Soldier always wears the jacket when he goes out. His guns are easier to hide with the jacket. Not yet. Sometime he will. Pressing things did not go well.

                The shore here is populated with people. They are watching the ocean and walking up and down as the sun goes down behind the buildings. Most of them are barefoot, none are covered head to toe. In fact—the Soldier does not remember things.

                _Not like I never saw a girl in a swimsuit before now, but they didn’t wear them like that at Coney Island._

The flickering presence is agitated, and the Soldier cannot blend in here. He walks on the streets until he comes to a slightly wooded area, big and hilly and easy to find a sheltered spot in. _Golf course_ , something supplies. He can sleep here, when he gets tired. In the meantime: name.

                His mind wanders back to the man on the bridge. Maybe the Soldier should start with _his_ name. He has read the file. They have not had the chance to take his memories of that file. Pieces of the others tremble like the shards of an eggshell, held together by a faint film of tissue. His mind is as messy and fluid as a broken yolk.

                The man on the bridge. Tall: 194 centimeters, approximately. Big: 115 kilos, approximately. Light hair, white skin, blue eyes. Alias: Captain America. Name: Steven Rogers. Something snaps inside the Soldier’s head.

                He remembers. Alexander Pierce was there. Pierce had the red book. He doesn’t remember the full significance of the red books. Alexander Pierce handled the Winter Soldier for HYDRA, gave the Soldier its North American missions. Alexander Pierce backhanded the Soldier when it couldn’t give its mission report. _I knew him._ It’s significant. The man on the bridge. Steven Rogers is someone the Soldier knows, and since the Soldier doesn’t _know people,_ not like the Soldier meant, that means the flicker thing knows Steven Rogers. _Knew him._ The Soldier works the words around in his mouth, whispers them.

                “I knew him.” His voice trails off, only the pines and grass and the bats fluttering in the air to hear him. He can’t quite remember now. Whatever dredged up the hint of recognition during the fight was wiped away, turned smooth, solid, hard, unsiftable; sand after lightning.

                He lies back on the grass, ignores the occasional stinging inquiry of mosquitoes, and tries to let what he knows of Steven Rogers to seep back into his mind like salt water creeping up tidal creeks. Like the cold of snow outside condensing tracked-in water to bead on walls and ceiling. To form like crystals of ice ripped from his breath and sweat as supercooled glass and metal and air freeze his lungs _fucking solid—_

He takes a strangled breath of humid, salty, _warm_ air. Less metaphors for remembering. He suspects he can’t actually control when he remembers these things. The knowledge runs over him, not particularly troubling, though the flickering thing doesn’t like it at all. The Soldier is used to not controlling things. His guns and knives and the heartbeats of his targets, nothing more. He will wait to remember more about Steven Rogers. The flickering thing is incomprehensible in its desires. The Soldier does not desire anything; he needs to remain hidden.

                He watches the stars come out, identifying where lines and patches of blackness are the branches and needles of the pine tree he’s lying under. He slows his breathing until he can hear the distinctive engines of all the cars on the two roads (Golf View Drive and 11th Avenue), and the nearly silent footsteps of foxes and rabbits.

                He wakes up when dawn is still far off, the sky dark blue. He gets up and leaves the golf course, walking east on the sidewalk, till he’s going over the wooden walkway across the small dunes, and the soft roar and hiss of the Atlantic fills his ears. There is light from the moon, streaking the black water with uneven lines of color. No one else is on the beach, and he takes his boots off, walks in up to his knees. Pieces of shell prickle the bottom of the Soldier’s callused feet. He sticks in his right hand, his head, running the water through his hair and pushing it back.

                _I’m not going to fight you._ That’s what Steven Rogers said to him on the flying structure. He licks salt water from his lips and leans into the remnants of a breaker rushing past his knees. The Soldier shot him, three different times. Not kill shots. Debilitating shots, on any other man. The file said ARTIFICIALLY ENHANCED STRENGTH AND STAMINA. They should have been headshots. The Soldier can make a headshot from 2 and a half kilometers. He also has artificially enhanced strength and stamina.

                He is not sure whether his metal arm can rust. He has never been away long enough to find out. They always clean and repair the arm. Rough cloths to wipe away grime and blood, the covering panels peeled back to repair circuits and machinery. He catches a lot of bullets in that palm. Under the glove he’s wearing, in the cracks between the small scales that fold and overlap when he closes his hand, there is probably still some of Steven Rogers’ blood. The Soldier punched him in the face, hard, hard enough to kill a normal man. He knew about the artificially enhanced strength. He could have hit harder. Headshot.

                _I’m not going to fight you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title note: so the Grand Strand is a name for the beaches in that area, specifically Myrtle Beach and adjacent beaches. I don't know how to title things.


	4. In Motion Again

                The Soldier dislikes the idea of staying in this town indefinitely. He does not have a great desire to go anywhere: just survive. Stay hidden. Wait for the other part of him to grow. But staying hidden here will not be easy. The town is not particularly big, and though it is filled with tourists, he can guess that buffer of strangers will run out with the summer. According to a newspaper stolen from a gas station, it is the start of Bike Week, and in a few short days, the number of men in black leather jackets and gloves will shrink dramatically. If he wants a motorcycle, he needs to take one soon.

                The Soldier knows the location of several HYDRA bases. Some of them must still be operational. He knows the location of several Cold War stashes containing resources. What kind of resources he can use, in 2014, he does not know. He does not know how to use a digital computer with proficiency: just the skills deemed useful for missions. He does not know how to use the small handheld telephones that Pierce and the others and every modern person carries. The only thing the Soldier is truly adept at is killing people: from far away, with a rifle; close by, with a bomb; personally, with a knife; brutally, with his bare hands.

                But: he can learn new things. He steals a backpack (black, lightweight, not especially hardy), some more food and water, and a paper notebook.

                He goes to the Horry County Public Library, avoiding the desks with the librarians. He is not the only homeless person here: an old man, who does not wash his hair and body in the ocean, is sitting in the cooled air. The Soldier ignores them. There are tables and chairs, and shelves of books between the tables and the doors. There are newspapers in the library: most of them have a front-page story about Washington, D.C. Smoke curls up black and heavy from SHIELD headquarters; fires smolder on the banks of the green Potomac. There are no pictures of the Soldier; he is still a ghost.

                Reading the books is difficult. Choosing the books is difficult. He squints, turns his head to the side to read their titles. Narrow Roman letters glitter against dark spines. He waits for the other part of him to latch onto something.

                There is an encyclopedia from 2004. He takes the R volume and reads about the dissolution of the Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик. That was after, he _thinks,_ he was back in the control of HYDRA. Maybe HYDRA had had him the entire time, its emblematic tentacles buried as deep in the Soviets as in the Americans. _Cut off one head, two more shall rise._ The end of the Soviet Union had not ended conflict in the world. Not stymied HYDRA; maybe even been its goal.

                He is getting the migraine he develops if he thinks much about _why_ he has his missions. He had his missions to bring about a better world; his handlers told him this in soothing voices, as warming as the hot lights they ringed his chair with. He has his doubts about the truth of that, now: he could be convinced and taught and made to obey, but wouldn’t—wouldn’t he want to go back if it was good? Is he a _good man?_

The sense he gets from the disturbed flicker in the bottom of his mind tells him, no, HYDRA isn’t good, and no, he’s not a good man.

                Is he a _man_ at all? Also up for debate. Not with himself, though. His head hurts too much. He knows some new things. The only people in the library are old and nonthreatening; he guesses they are close to the age of the little kids that used to run around the streets—he sucks in a breath of cool air, slams the encyclopedia closed. The memory is sharp, a bright fragment. Watching a crowd of children with a ball and some long sticks attempt to play baseball: the ball smashing into trash bins and walls and landing in the dreck of the alley.

                The flicker of otherness seethes and roils, not letting him pull any information out of the memory beyond the fragmented impression. The Soldier turns to find a book on the current state of Russia and the former Soviet states. He needs to know what their passports look like now.

                There are no such books in the section of shelves he is behind. He makes his way to the NONFICTION section, getting a frightened look from an old woman in white slacks and blue sweater. Some instinct makes him smile and nod at her with an expression that feels as foreign as it does automatic. He doesn’t know how he looks, but her expression softens marginally.

                He finds a stretch of books devoted to information about travel, and turns pages carefully. They do not have information about their respective countries’ passports or border policies. Well, he can go around those. He can go places without a passport and without local currency, too, but he doesn’t quite want to. The Soldier is not troubled at this revelation, either. He has no problem stealing and lying, but those are generally things people disapprove of. The flickering presence may disapprove.

                As soon as he thinks it, though, he knows it’s not true. Whatever is sputtering for breath in his mind is not concerned about stealing and lying. Whatever is down there is nearly as comfortable as the Soldier with killing. What it wants—as always, when he tries to pin down the nebulous intentions of the flicker, they burn away like fog. Something heavy pulls inside his chest, knocks him to his knees among the travel books. He grabs his face with his hand, tiny crystals of salt brushing off his cracked, dry skin. A memory comes—one of his missions, crawling through wet, hot jungle, mud covering every inch of his metal arm, every gleaming surface on his rifle. A whole language unfolds like a fan in his mind. He speaks Spanish.

                He goes back to the section he was in, finds a book of maps. He can go a little west, then south on the interstate, all the way to where he knows some long-ago Soviet agent stashed money and papers. The Soldier does not have memories, but things like bolt-holes and rendezvous points remain firm in his mind. He memorizes the route to Georgia. Then he steps out into the summer heat, walks down 17 until the sun is half down.

                “Keys,” he demands of a man about to ride away from a gas pump. His voice is deep and hoarse, uneven and sticky in his throat from disuse. The man, with a shaven head and thick beard, gives a short laugh, then looks to his left. The Soldier already knows his friends are there. He has plenty of time. He shoves his hand into the man’s right pocket, where a tell-tale chain disappears, crushes the chain, pockets the wallet, and grabs the man by the shoulders before he can do more than jerk in surprise. Most of the Soldier glories in the return to battle, even swift and unmatched as this is. He hauls the man off the bike and strips off his leather jacket before he can yell, and turns to show the gun under his sweatshirt when the biker grabs for a boot knife. The friends are finally moving forward. The Soldier throws him bodily into them, the thud and havoc soothing as the stretch of an unused muscle in his mind. The Soldier puts on the jacket, then the helmet on the handlebars, and pulls out onto the highway.

                His heart pounds in his chest, his hands still and electric over the throttle and brake. The heavy growl, like a bear, of the motorcycle under him is familiar twice-over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Going to Georgia," because I like that song for this chapter. 
> 
> _I have two big hands and a heart pumping blood, and a 1967 Colt .45 with a busted safety catch. The world shines as I cross the Macon County line, going to Georgia._


	5. Visions Through the Pines

                The interstate is a grey monotony, flanked by endless pines.  He waited most of the night, motorcycle hidden, reluctant to leave the sigh of the ocean. The sea is unchanging: some part of the Soldier, some part of the flickering thing that used to be him, it loves the sea.  But he went, before sunrise. Green and white signs count down the miles to places that matter. He speeds past cars and trucks: this bike is fast. He pulls off at exits where there are signs marked with the logos of service stations. He uses the cash from the biker in Myrtle Beach to fill the tank of the motorcycle, and buys bottles of water and blue Powerade, and jerky and sweet-salty bars. He eats them standing among cigarette butts and bits of broken glass at the side of the little store. He has to drink a lot of water: they are tough and chewy, and he hasn’t eaten anything tough in a long time. He sips water, swishes it around in his mouth. There is a phantom memory of a tube, pressing his tongue down, making his jaw ache. Rigid and rubber-edged and harsh in his mouth. He touches the corners of his mouth, but all he can feel is the rasp of growing stubble, the grit of salt and road dust.

                The land doesn’t change much. It becomes flatter or hillier in turns. The summer air is humid and thick, full of the smell of green crops and pine sap and red, unwelcoming earth. The sky is blue and bright, the sun a blinding white eye. He sweats into the helmet, sweats into the leather and modern fabric of his combat gear, into the cotton clothes he’s stolen. It is a familiar smell, a familiar dampness in his lungs that comes from breathing behind a mask.

                He pulls off the interstate into the shade of some young trees, staggers and falls to his knees, rips the helmet off. A chunk of his hair was caught in the visor and it rips out with a sting. He ignores it. Pain is irrelevant. Discomfort does not exist. Pain is irrelevant. Damage is assessed after the mission is complete. Pain may signify damage, but pain does not contribute to functionality, or lack thereof. He sucks in humid air, still sharper than the fug of his own breath inside the helmet. The sunlight is painfully bright without the shaded visor. The Soldier wishes absently for the black paint he wore under the tac glasses, all around his eyes. He’s not sunburned much on the face, because he wore the hat all the time, but light reflects off the pale skin around his eyes and his nose.

                He braces himself against the trunk of a tree, trying to feel the roughness of pine bark through all his layers, but he can’t. A tractor-trailer roars by, kicking up a little dust. The Soldier drags the motorcycle further into the cover of the trees: not truly hidden, but not just on the shoulder of the road. He can feel something building up, an unfamiliar feeling in his legs and chest and head. His breath comes short but easy.

                He strips off his boots, the scratch of pine needles and dead vegetation hardly noticeable under his callused feet. The gloves, the biker jacket. The sweatshirt and the shirt. The combat jacket is hard to take off, but he does. Strips off the holsters and everything useful attached to it. His skin is clammy and damp to the touch. He feels like he’s steaming in the shade of the trees.

                The jacket lies on the ground. The Soldier kicks some pine needles over it, feeling its breathing shorten and shallow out. It flinches, tries to ready itself for the white pain of the chair. It washed before, took all its clothes off. The road bellows with a passing truck. Insects scream in the trees. The Soldier grabs the sweatshirt, buries its face in it, breathes in. The brine smell is still there. The smell of the ocean. The Soldier sits down, right side facing the road, and tries to think itself back to where it should be.

                Going to a stash spot. South Georgia.

                The chair is not here. Taking the jacket off is not acceptable except when the Soldier is close to the chair. The chair follows the jacket. The chair—the chair, it sits in the chair, it bites on the bit, it wears the cuffs, it knows the shape of leather and metal under its back as well as he knows the feeling of its guns in its hands, the chair, why can it remember the chair now, it never thinks of the chair on missions, the chair is the anchor of the Soldier’s whole world.

                The Soldier leans forward and throws up into the dirt. It throws up in the chair, sometimes. It has a hazy picture of watching gloved fingers and a metal probe dig something from his right shoulder. _Die Narkose st_ _ö_ _rt das Gefrieren._ The pain had been twisty and gone deep and dragged and it threw up. Not onto the wound, it wasn’t that far gone. Someone poured cold water onto its chest and washed it off.

                The flicker is agitated, trying to make the Soldier upset about the pain, the chair. The Soldier is already upset, actually: whether it or the flicker is making it feel this way, it can’t tell. Things are different than they have ever been.

                He spits onto the ground. The clammy sweat is gone, replaced with the sweat of nerves. He goes to stand in the sun and sweat the sweat of heat and tiredness, replace some of the rank smell. He rips off some pine needles, crushes them, sniffs them. Finds a young branch, rubs the sap onto his sides and hands. When he’s certain that his whole upper body will be sunburned, and glad of it, he drinks an entire bottle of blue Powerade. Then he puts on the shirt and sweatshirt, the holsters, and the biker’s jacket. The jacket is black and has a patch with a design sewn onto the back of it: a complex sigil, with a tiger and a snake and a thorny flower and a bloody knife. He puts the gloves back on, then the boots at last.       

                He remembers Steven Rogers, remembers the helpless catch of his left arm as he was unable to deliver another blow. His hands were unable to shoot. His fists were unable to strike. The mission, ground to a mess against a wall in the Soldier’s mind. A tremor works its way through his body, slow like the lazy curl of a moving snake. His fingers curl into a fist, and he turns without thought and punches the trunk of a smaller tree. It creaks, shakes all the way up to its canopy, and bark and wood chips shower out around his fist. A long crack has split both up and down from the impact. The tree is still standing, though, the shock having gone down into the roots and up into the branches.

                The Soldier flexes the remains of his shoulder, stretches his neck. He feels the impact down his spine. He can hit harder than a normal man, even with his flesh arm. He can run faster, jump higher, fall from great heights. He can recover from injuries faster. He still feels pain like a normal man. That is a revelation for a second. He didn’t know that, before. But while he does not have concrete memories, he now has an impression of pain _before_ (before what?) being just as bad, maybe not as bad, as pain _after._ His mind will not define what central point divides _before_ and _after._

                Some mission, is likely.

                He puts the motorcycle back onto the road, the lowering sun an orange blaze in his right eye. He focuses on the sharp smell of pine resin, the fading ache down his back, the lingering taste of Mountain Berry Blast, the grip of the motorcycle handles in his hands. The hot, sweaty closeness of the glove on his right hand, the awareness of the pressure of his fingers on his left. The seething, staticky uneasiness that defines the Soldier’s state of mind is more prominent than it was the day prior.

                The interstate shimmers black with tree shadow and gold with lingering sunlight. The Soldier falls in behind a white and silver cargo truck, teeth set behind his visor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "The Diaz Brothers" by the Mountain Goats.


End file.
